It is, of course, annoying for users, but given they are mandated to purchase insurance, they are all but certain to return to the site and to continue to do so until they access it.
Matthew Yglesias, writing for Slate, argues the glitches won’t really matter, and I agree with him. He draws on lessons from the Medicare Part D launch which had its own glitches, but ultimately they didn’t seem to matter much.
He also calls out HHS for its attempt to design a website that goes way beyond users’ expectations. Healthcare.gov is a visually pleasing website but perhaps less of a focus on design and a greater focus on architecture could have minimized the site’s glitches. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. He writes:
“I’ve referred to the technical problems with the ACA websites several times as embarrassing and gotten some pushback from angry liberals. But they are embarrassing. And I think that if you look at the very elegant basic design of the pages, you can tell that the staff at HHS and the White House set about to do something that far exceeded the typical person’s expectations of a government website. They wanted to prove the doubters wrong and have a product worth bragging about. They failed. But the basic lesson of Part D holds. Unless for some reason they’re unable to make any progress whatsoever over the next six weeks, these problems are not any kind of serious threat to the program. Seven years from now, nobody’s going to care about this stuff.”
